Messaging app Telegram is celebrating its eighth anniversary with the push to version 8, packing in a whole bunch of improvements that will make sending stickers and emoji more lively and timely, speed up your channel browsing experience, and drastically increase the headroom of live streams and group video calls. And yes, you can get it all right now.
Stickers get a big boost in priority as the browsing experience will now include a new trending section that lets you quickly download the latest and greatest packs.
The suggestions bar is now also expandable with just a drag, giving you a better look at the thumbnails. And if you’re stuck for a while deciding which one to use, your partner will now see your status as “choosing a sticker.”
Prefer emoji instead? The Telegram team has animated at least another 21 symbols for some pep to your replies. They’ve been at this for a couple of years now, so the selection should be pretty huge by this point.
When it comes to channels, there are new ways of surfing between them as well as all the comments you may care about. You won’t have to dip back and forth to the chat list anymore: when you hit the bottom of a channel, pull up and release to automatically scroll to the next unread one — the sequence is determined by how you’ve structured your list, folder, sub-folder, or archive. And if you’re returning to a comment thread you’re interested in, you’ll see a counter for new, unread replies.
If you’re a forwarding fiend, you now have more control over how what you share appears to the recipient. You can now preview your forward before right before sending and opt to hide the senders name and/or captions that go with any attached media. You can also change the recipient if you’ve made a mistake.
Finally, for the conference makers and stream hosts, Telegram has blown off the viewership cap. You can now have (way) more than 1,000 people watching or participating in your show at once. And to think that group video calls were only introduced just a couple of months ago.
You can try your luck obtaining the update through the Play Store or grab it directly from APK Mirror.
